Disclaimer- Does not belong to me, none of it
A/N- Please, please leave reviews? Oh, and, of course, there's a ton of swearing in here. Just a warning.
Ella closed her eyes. "I... Well, I guess you've gotta understand the sort of person I am. Mark, I dunno what you think of me, but I'm a coward, okay? I'm afraid of everything. Roger's gonna fucking die, and he goes through life with more bravery and determination than I do. I have a full life, a real life promised to me, and I can't do anything with it because I'm too fucked up…"
She trailed off for a moment. Mark knew that, if there was ever a time for him to interrupt her, it was this very second, but he also knew that she simply could not be stopped. Either she would go on or she would give up.
"I said before, I think, that Roger was real protective of me," she continued after a second. "'cuz he was. But the problem with Roger was that he wasn't nearly as protective of himself. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, he was doing all sort of drugs and shit with Tom. I knew that they did all the basics… Coke, pot, maybe some E here and there, I dunno for sure on anything. But the one thing that Roger did that Tom Collins didn't was… god, it's hard to say now. He was hooked on heroin from the time that he was like, sixteen on. When he was eighteen and I was thirteen, I found one of his needles and baggies and all that."
She stopped again, biting her lip and squeezing her eyes shut. Mark wanted to reach out, to touch her shoulder, to find some way to comfort her, but he couldn't. He suddenly did not want to have to be holding the camera to keep it perfectly trained upon her. He suddenly did not to even be filming this. It was like, like ripping a band-aid off of a cut before it was ready. Or maybe it was ready to be ripped off, but there was no way to know for sure. Or was there a way to know for sure that you were simply too stupid to see? It was confusing.
Ella glanced at him again, tears welling in her jade green eyes. She blinked them away quickly and Mark said nothing to her about them, though he wanted to.
He could still remember the last time he'd ever seen her. She'd been crying then, too. Roger, though he was angry with her, had still squinted away undeniable tears and Mark had had his face glued to his camera.
He also remembered one afternoon, when she must have been eleven or twelve, when the three of them had all been completely happy. It had been in the middle of the summer, some day when the Davis father was drunk off his ass and Ella and Roger found it ridiculously easy to sneak out of the house. They'd dragged Mark out of his room and to some park somewhere… It didn't even matter what it was called, which was fortunate, as Mark could not remember the name of the park at all. They'd drunk the sort of orange soda that tastes like bad orange toothpaste that has been carbonated, sugared, and bottled. They'd laughed. The Davises were tan. Mark looked like a vampire being exposed to the sun. They were happy. Roger's track marks were covered up by his shirt. Mark's eyes didn't look red. Ella looked like a strong, wiry angel.
Other guys Mark and Roger's age excluded their little sisters from their particular group of friends. Roger was the opposite. If Ella wanted to come somewhere with him and he didn't think it would be dangerous for her, he took her. When people said things to him, he would just shrug and tell them that if they wanted him around, they got her, too. People always wanted Roger Davis around.
Roger, Mark reflected, was the sort of person whose name would be capitalized even if it weren't a name and grammatically required to be capitalized. For instance, in some novels, when a person is talking about dust, they simply write the word 'dust'. But if it is magical dust that will somehow save the world from a terrible, awful, no-good, very bad plight, then it is often called 'Dust'. Even though someone would call just any ordinary Roger 'Roger' and not 'roger', if ordinary guys were simply called 'roger's, then Roger Davis would always be called 'Roger Davis'. Because, Mark decided, Roger and his sister were both the sort of people who needed capitalization.
Mark's thoughts were very, very cluttered.
Ella took a deep breath. "This one afternoon, after school, I was seriously upset… I kept remembering Roger's stuff, kept remembering the way he looked when he was high-"
Mark also remembered how Roger looked when we was high. When Roger was high, he had a soft, smiling look about him. He glazed over, dropped away all of the bad things in his life that he carried like a burden from Pilgrim's Progress.
Roger had once told him all of the things that being high did. He told him about how memories of things that you wanted to forget vanished. Mark, being the nosy teenager that he'd been at the time, was curious. He asked Roger exactly what memories vanished. Roger gave him a capital-lettered Look.
"I… I did all of the stuff and I shot up…" she whispered. "I was fucking thirteen. Thirteen. One-three."
Mark said nothing. He had seen the first time that she'd shot up. She had been sitting, cross-legged on the floor in the center of Roger's room, Roger's shoebox of heroin supplies- his needles, his stashes, the bandana, the candle, etc- open on the floor before her. The old bandana was firmly tied around her upper arm.
Mark had just been looking for Roger. He had finally tracked down their old friend, Tom Collins, who had a loft in New York and said that they could move in if they wanted to split with the rent. Instead, he walked in on his best friend's sister while she shot up at the age of thirteen.
Ella's eyes had been lightly closed and her face and jaw relaxed. Even if Mark hadn't seen the expression on Roger dozens upon dozens of times before, he would have known exactly what was happening. A thirteen-year-old girl had just shot up.
If Mark was the mature, responsible person that he always professed to being, he might have gone to Mr. Davis and said something. But, suddenly, he remembered the bruises up and down Roger and Ella's bodies. He held his tongue.
Ella went on. "I was addicted. So fucking addicted. One day, my dad went through my stuff. He found my stash. He started yelling and screaming… He was crazy… I was so afraid, Mark. So afraid…"
Her shoulders shook violently with rough, dry and silent sobs.
"Roger was standing right there," she mumbled, no longer looking directly at the camera. "Sort of dumbfounded. Dad just kept screaming and hitting and blood and noise and fear… Suddenly, I just screamed out, 'Roger! It's Roger's!'"
Mark took a deep breath.
"And… And Dad went on to Roger's room and it didn't take him long to find Roger's stash.. We both had to get drug tests… We both had heroin in our systems. I told on my fucking brother… He always tried to protect me, he was so good to me, and I tried to blame it on him. If it weren't for me, Dad never would have gone on to Roger's room. I had to go to rehab. Roger left. The end."
Tears began to spill from Ella's eyes, her face a sickly white. "Mark, can we please stop the tape rolling now? Please?"
